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Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Star Wars Armada - Most Wanted Tactica

Most Wanted

This objective is a little specialized, and requires you to build your list around it. If you’re running three big ships, then you should skip this objective. If your local meta is mostly small ship spam, then you should skip this objective. If you’re not sure you know every ship in the game fairly well, then you should skip this objective.

All the weight of this objective, for better or worse, falls on the second player. As a result, you can win or lose the game for yourself simply by including this objective in your list. I didn’t start playing it until after I played through three or four tournaments and felt like I had a serious handle on the game as a whole. Likewise, when wave three eventually comes out, I’ll set this objective aside for a month or so until get acquainted with the flotillas and how they fit into things.

So, now that you’ve been warned, lets talk about how amazing this objective can be in the right hands. If everything goes right under optimal conditions, this objective is worth a net of 162 points. This assumes you have a CR-90 B and your opponent as an ISD 2.

This brings me to the first advantage, you get to pick both objective ships. Your goal with this objective is to create a potentially devastating points imbalance by choosing the cheapest ship for your list and a significantly higher point cost ship from your opponent’s list. In current meta, this is fairly easy to do by running a dummy ship on your list, generally the Raider 1 or CR-90 B are optimal, but a Gladiator (without Demolisher) or Nebulon-B work almost as well. This guarantees you’ll at least be close to breaking even, should you run across a multiple small units list.

Now onto advantage two: extra dice. When either player attacks their opponent’s objective ship this can add one die of any color that is already in its attack pool. Under ideal circumstances, you want to consider what each of your ships will gain should your opponent choose this objective. Ideally, you won’t gain red dice, or you’ll have a trigger that lets you re-roll them (leading shots). It’s important to know exactly how you’ll use the extra dice, because your opponent gets the same advantage. This plays well with small ship spam or any color crit dependent list. First you get extra chances to roll the crit. But should you whiff your die roll, the extra die make the cost of effects like Screed or other die spenders less painful.

As an Ackbar player, I don’t like this objective for my favorite admiral. Red dice have a diminishing return, and I can’t run leading shots on every ship. While Home One can help, with five dice firing off the side of a Gup, there is usually a blank or two or three or five already in the mix.

Finally, the points I’ve already mentioned. If you can keep your objective ship alive great. But the extra points can outright end a tournament run for your opponent. Just make sure you choose a target you can kill. There is no point in swinging for the fence by choosing an MC80 or ISD 2 if you’re not sure you can kill it. It’s better to get an extra 72/81 points from a dead Gup than nothing at all.

I hope this was somewhat helpful and informative. Until next time—She’s Got Admiral Ackbar Eyes.

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I've been collecting and painting models since I was about 12 years old. My painting improved dramatically after a short stint working for Games Workshop. I'm always looking for the next challenge and the next skill I can learn.